abandonware games sorted by popularity

Voodoo Island is a classic adventure that sends the player into a mysterious tropical setting filled with strange events, dangerous situations, and the obligatory feeling that stay...

Destruction Derby (1995) is the game that taught us driving isn’t about speed or elegance—it’s about gleefully ramming your car into other vehicles until only twi...

The title Dinosaur Balls might raise eyebrows today, but in 1992 it was just a quirky DOS puzzle game. Think of it as prehistoric Bubble Bobble: you fire colored spheres to match a...

Stargunner is a 1996 side-scrolling shooter that delivers fast, colorful space combat with plenty of enemies, explosions, weapons, and screen-filling chaos. The player pilots a hea...

Not every game involves saving kingdoms or defeating monsters, and Magic: The Gathering Interactive Encyclopedia proudly embraces a different mission. This software serves as a com...

Total Carnage is a wonderfully unsubtle top-down shooter in which the solution to almost every problem is to fire more ammunition. Lots more ammunition. You control heavily armed s...

Tomahawk is an early helicopter flight simulation that puts the player behind the controls of a military aircraft and expects them to take the job rather seriously. Navigation, wea...

18th Airborne is what happens when a military recruitment pamphlet and a tactical shooter have a baby. You’re thrown into the boots of a paratrooper with a mission, a gun, an...

Ah, Black Sect (1993), where the puzzles are cryptic, the villagers are creepy, and the atmosphere is so thick you could spread it on toast. A classic first-person point-and-click ...

Rise of the Triad: Dark War is a 1994 first-person shooter famous for its fast action, outrageous weapons, and gleefully excessive violence. Built on an enhanced version of the Wol...

Released in 1987, Laser Surgeon: The Microscopic Mission offers one of gaming's more unusual premises by shrinking players down for a medical adventure inside the human body. Inste...

Step into the Korean War with Conflict: Korea, where you command UN forces and discover that even in strategy games, North Korea is a problem. It follows the same system as the res...

Moraff's Revenge delivers a classic dungeon-crawling role-playing adventure packed with monsters, treasure, exploration, and enough dangerous corridors to make staying home seem in...

Banner Mania is a DOS graphics utility devoted to the surprisingly important art of making banners, signs, headings, and other large pieces of text. Before modern desktop publishin...

Music Time Deluxe is a Windows-era music education and composition package designed to help users explore musical notation, theory, and basic composition. Instead of treating the c...

Arachne is a graphical web browser for DOS. Arachne was developed by Michal Polák and released in the early 1990s as a text-mode web browser with limited graphical capabilit...

Before the term “VR” existed, Knightmare (1986, DOS) gave you a taste of immersive peril. Inspired by the UK TV show, you guide a blindfolded knight through deadly dung...

Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road in 1988 continued the tradition of heroic soldiers storming impossible odds while carrying enough ammunition to challenge basic physics. This sequel ...

Santa's Xmas Caper is a 1993 DOS holiday-themed action game that puts players in the middle of a festive adventure involving Santa Claus and the usual seasonal chaos. Instead of qu...

In Diggers 2: Extractors, released in 1995, the digging franchise doubled down on strategy while adding a dash of science fiction flair. This time, your miners aren’t just bu...

Kaiser places players in charge of building wealth through commerce, diplomacy, and careful management rather than endless battles. Set against a historical backdrop, it challenges...

Aliants: The Desperate Battle For Earth! is a science-fiction strategy game built around the suitably alarming idea that humanity has run out of time and extraterrestrial enemies a...

No relation to Dune (except for being a total rip-off), Arrakis is a homebrew strategy game that feels like a tribute to the sandiest planet in sci-fi. You mine spice, fight vaguel...

If Rambo had a twin brother who preferred hiding behind sandbags and tossing grenades like candy, Cabal would be his biography. This over-the-top shooter puts you in the boots of a...

Checkers for Windows is exactly what it says on the tin—checkers. But somehow, it turns this rainy-afternoon classic into a digital duel of patience and spite. No explosions,...

Toobin turns the simple idea of floating downstream into an arcade challenge that is much less relaxing than it sounds. You control a character riding an inner tube through winding...

Released in 1994, Jagged Alliance helped define tactical turn-based strategy long before every game wanted to be an open-world crafting survival experience. Set on the troubled isl...

If you’ve ever wondered what baseball would look like if someone crammed the entire sport into a DOS machine and sprinkled a bit of 90s attitude on top, Epic Baseball has you...

Before heroes had inventory screens and voice acting, there was Adventure in Serenia, the lovechild of a text parser and a fever dream. Released in 1982, this proto-graphic adventu...

Sherlock Holmes: The Vatican Cameos is a 1986 DOS adventure built around a Sherlock Holmes mystery and the detective's trademark combination of observation, deduction, and careful ...